How FreelanceRepublik Tested 200+ ATS and Chose Spott

Company: FreelanceRepublik  |  Team: ~40 people  |  Model: Tech freelance platform  |  Previous setup: 10-year in-house ATS

Key results

• 200+ ATS platforms benchmarked worldwide before choosing Spott
• 150,000+ freelancers in the database, with AI matching surfacing a relevant longlist of 50 candidates in seconds
• Talent Acquisition and Business Development unified on a single platform - same data, same workflows, real-time visibility
• Sourcing tasks that used to take hours now take minutes thanks to AI enrichment and candidate rediscovery

Why FreelanceRepublik went looking for a purpose-built platform

Guillaume Lepercq is co-founder of FreelanceRepublik, a French tech freelance platform that places senior tech and digital experts on strategic projects for large groups, mid-market firms, and scale-ups. The company is a member of the French Tech 120, generates over €120 million in revenue, and has 800+ freelancers on assignment at any given time.

For over a decade, FreelanceRepublik ran on a homegrown ATS built specifically for their teams. The system had its strengths - features built tightly around their workflows and strong sourcing capability. But maintaining a custom ATS was never the team's core business. As AI capabilities accelerated across the market, the cost of keeping up internally was growing fast.

The team made the strategic decision to focus their internal engineering effort on Gemo, their AI sourcing copilot offered to clients, and to move their ATS onto a purpose-built market solution.

With the arrival of AI, we decided to focus our internal development on Gemo, our AI sourcing tool. So we started looking for a market ATS that could match the functional depth we had built in-house - and go further on database updates, matching, advanced filters, automation, and business piloting.

Guillaume Lepercq, co-founder of FreelanceRepublik

200 ATS platforms benchmarked, structured like an enterprise procurement

The team treated the selection process the same way they would advise their own clients to approach a strategic tech decision. They ran one of the most thorough ATS benchmarks the recruitment industry has seen.

FreelanceRepublik tested over 200 platforms worldwide, with a structured methodology built around demos, product trials, videos, webinars, and detailed feature analyses.

The evaluation criteria reflected what they actually needed from an operating system:

• UX - would the team actually use it?
• API - could it integrate with their own platform?
• Matching - could it surface the right candidates from a 150,000-strong database?
• Sourcing - could it support an active outbound model?
• Marketplace - would the ecosystem support their workflows?
• Analytics - could leadership pilot the business from the data?
• Operational OS capacity - could it run both Talent Acquisition and Business Development on the same data?

And in the end, I came across Spott.

Why Spott came out on top

Spott wasn't the biggest brand on the list. Not by a long shot. But it was the platform Guillaume judged most promising and most intelligent in execution.

What's great about Spott is that they were created at the same time as AI. So in every functional area, they were able to integrate AI natively. When we tested other tools, we could see they were 10 years old. Features had just been stacked on top of each other and weren't really up to date anymore. Spott is fully AI-native from the start. That's their real strength.

Three things made Spott the clear winner of the benchmark:

The product fundamentals were exceptional. The first features Guillaume tested, including the API, were very well executed. UI and UX are make-or-break for adoption, and Spott was clearly built by a team that understood that.

The team made the difference. Choosing an operational tool means betting on the people behind it. Conversations with Manu and Lander, Spott's co-founders, made it clear this was a team that listened, iterated fast, and would build with their customers rather than around them.

When you choose an operational tool, you're betting on the team and on the product philosophy. We could feel right away that Spott was operating at a high level. The openness, the speed of product development, and the integration flexibility clearly made the difference.

The long-term vision was right. The roadmap around ATS synchronisation, AI enrichment, and candidate rediscovery had clear potential. Guillaume saw a platform that could grow with FreelanceRepublik rather than constrain it.

What changed

AI matching that closes deals

FreelanceRepublik's database holds over 150,000 freelancers. Surfacing the right 50 candidates for a client mandate, fast, is the difference between winning and losing the deal.

We needed a tool precise enough in matching to immediately give us a longlist of 50 relevant candidates to call, so we could then present them to our clients. Spott developed an AI matching solution that's quite advanced. It allowed us, for example, to close a deal just last week.

Database enrichment and candidate rediscovery

One of the biggest changes is what Spott does in the background. Candidate profiles enrich automatically. Stale records refresh continuously. The system surfaces previously buried candidates when they become newly relevant.

The data enrichment and profile refresh have completely changed how we exploit our talent pool. Scoring, matching, and ranking let us identify candidates much faster. We can now automatically reconnect our ATS to several databases and enrich profiles at scale. We can also exploit our private ATS data, public sourcing, and market signals in a single workflow. Before, those operations were fragmented across multiple tools, mostly manual, and far less commercially useful.

Talent Acquisition and Business Development on the same platform

Before Spott, FreelanceRepublik's TA team and BD team ran on different systems with different data. After Spott, they share one operating environment.

Today, the Talent Acquisition and Business Development teams work in the same environment, on the same data. That creates much more alignment between sourcing, matching, and client acquisition. We have a unified view of the pipeline, the talent, and the business opportunities in real time.

Hours of manual work compressed to minutes

The day-to-day impact on the team is measured in time recovered.

We've considerably reduced the time spent on sourcing and manual qualification. Some tasks that used to take several hours are now done in a few minutes thanks to automation and AI enrichment. The ability to exploit databases of tens of thousands of profiles and rediscover talent automatically has significantly improved our productivity.

A co-built integration, not a standard deployment

FreelanceRepublik's operational model is specific. Deep ATS integrations are needed to connect to their dashboards, candidate imports, custom workflows, and deal spread for financial and contractual management.

We worked closely with Spott on ATS synchronisation with our platform, our client and freelance dashboards, deal spread for financial management, candidate imports, workflows, and API endpoints. The relationship very quickly went beyond the standard client/vendor frame, and became a real product partnership.

The verdict

After benchmarking 200+ ATS platforms, FreelanceRepublik now actively recommends Spott in their network.

Spott is one of the very few platforms that really understands the modern challenges of recruitment and staffing. After analysing more than 200 ATS, it's the solution that felt the most promising and the most intelligent in its execution. But what we recommend most is the team. Their product delivery speed, quality of execution, API openness, and capacity to build with their customers.

Guillaume Lepercq, co-founder of FreelanceRepublik

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